Abstract

We present a formal framework for (minimal) module
extraction based on an abstract notion of inseparability
w.r.t. a signature between ontologies.
Two instances of this framework are discussed in
detail for DL-Lite ontologies: concept inseparability, when ontologies imply the same complex concept inclusions over the signature, and query inseparability, when they give the same answers to
existential queries for any instance data over the
signature. We demonstrate that different types of
corresponding minimal modules for these inseparability
relations can be automatically extracted from large-scale DL-Lite ontologies by composing the tractable syntactic locality-based module extraction algorithm with intractable extraction algorithms using the multi-engine QBF solver AQME. The extracted minimal modules are compared with those obtained using non-logic-based approaches.